But nothing I know about how I learned to do the things I am good at doing leads me to believe that there are “secrets” to the piano or the sewing machine or any art I’m no good at. There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Even without identifying narration with falsification, one must admit that a vast amount of our life narration is fictional—how much, we cannot tell.

Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after clearing her throat, “Offer your experience as your truth.”

People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable.

A culture or a psychology predicated upon man as human and woman as other cannot accept a woman as artist.

Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

Fiction in particular, narration in general, may be seen not as a disguise or falsification of what is given but as an active encounter with the environment by means of posing options and alternatives, and an enlargement of present reality by connecting it to the unverifiable past and the unpredictable future.

True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job.